Archive for Scott Roberts
Scott was born and raised on the tough as nails streets of suburban Glen Ellyn, Illinois. He fell in love with shooting and editing terrible movies in the 6th grade, when he first picked up his friend’s half-broken, handle-less camcorder. That love affair continued through high school, as Scott spent more and more time on his movies and less and less time on his studies.
Still Scott managed to graduate and attended Southern Illinois University - Carbondale, where he happily obtained his Bachelor's Degree in Cinema and Photography in 2006.
Unfortunately that didn’t guarantee him a job. Scott spent the summer after graduation looking for an editing position with no success. So that fall he found himself working as a janitor for the Wheaton Park District to make ends meet.
Never fear—Scott’s story has a happy ending. A few months later—at the end of 2006—Edit Creations popped Scott’s reel into a deck and offered him a job. He has been a junior editor with Edit Creations since January of 2007. He is truly grateful to have found a position where he can continue to learn and grow as an editor.
And we at Edit Creations are grateful to have found Scott. His dry sense of humor, talent and dedication are truly appreciated. And even though he offered on that first interview—we don’t make him clean the restrooms.
The Nintendo Editing System
OH WOW! BREAKING NEWS!! In case you you didn’t hear last night, there has been some exciting news in the world of post production in the wake of the Apple announcement of the iPad. Lovable video game company Nintendo has just announced they would like to join the editing world with the release of the Nintedit System!
Whether or not this ends up being any kind of major player in the editing world is still in question, but I was blown away at the potential capabilities of the system, yet completely shocked in general that they are even deciding to make this. I’ve loved Nintendo for years, dating all the way back to NES, and I think it’s crazy that they would try and make this jump into post-production. I guess they wanted to make the case that video editing should be fun and universal, and shouldn’t be left alone to the technical folk.
The Top 25 Movies of 2009
Today I join the extremely rare air of millions of internet folk. Today I do something that everyone from Roger Ebert to CindyCinema.com to your Aunt Rebecca does. Today I will list my favorite movies from 2009, to the excessively high amount of 25. Why 25? Because I go to the theater almost every weekend, I’ve seen about 60 movies from this year, so listing only 10 would inhibit my urge to talk about what movies I’ve seen. Plus everybody loves a list!
So let’s get right into it. I’ll be SPOILER-FREE. Here are picks for my favorite movies from the Year 1 A.D…K. (After Dark Knight)…
One Last Desperate Argument for DVDs
The talk of the future of home entertainment is largely about how we will never have to deal with having physical copies of movies anymore, as everything will just be digital downloads. This may very well be true, in fact, I’m sure it will happen at some point. That won’t stop me from grabbing my soapbox and megaphone to proclaim how much better I think DVDs are.
As a way to perhaps show how biased I may potentially be, I will say I am a full-on collector of DVDs. And not in a “yeah, I have 80 DVDs, my collection is pretty sweet…” kind of way. At the moment I’m typing this, I have 1,167 DVDs. I’m not joking.
But for the record, I’m not opposed to digital downloads. I think they are good in a certain way, but I also don’t think they are as amazing as they are said to be. I’ve even dabbled slightly in the downloading world, but in the end, I’m still a stubborn fan of the DVD. Let me state my case, and feel free to offer a rebuttal to any of my claims.
Super Editing Tips with Winston Randall Montgomery IV
There are a plethora of resources everywhere to teach you how to be an editor. There’s training websites like Lynda.com and Creative Cow. You can buy assorted training books at some coffeehouse-bookstore hybrid, where some homely fellow is likely playing new age music on a grand piano for Ramen noodle money. You could even go as far as to attend a terrible, terrible place called film school… But I laugh at you for doing these things. Laugh right in your pathetic face! You know why? Because I’m an elitist. I am better than you.
I eat dinner with 12 different solid gold forks. I have have different solid gold forks for different areas of the $800 steaks I eat. I only drink the first sip of a glass of $6000 wine, because I’m only satisfied with the first sip of a full glass of expensive wine. Then I throw the rest of the glass away and request a new drink just so I can take the first sip again. It typically costs me $150,000 to get drunk. What?! You’d like the rest of the glass?! How dare you! I would never allow someone who learned editing at film school to have my unused wine. I would rather destroy an entire wine field than give it to you, which is something I normally do once a month anyway, just for the sport of it.
I’d apologize to you for such a berating of your character, but my servant is currently cleaning the wheels of my Lexus with a toothbrush, and I normally have him apologize to commoners. But the reason I yell at you is because I love you, we are fellow editors, we are required to love each other by United States law. And I don’t want another tedious lawsuit on my hands. I just wanted to let you know that everything you know about editing is wrong.
I’m about to retire, so I’ll let you in on my biggest industry secret, since I have nothing to lose. There is an unimaginable resource located in the nether regions of the internet FULL of brilliant ideas by brilliant people. I take these ideas, and compile them into the greatest workable resource known to post production. So sit back and enjoy infinite knowledge! All you have to do is type in www.youtube.com.
Cinema 4D Top 5 Advancement Recap Update 2009 Part 2 of 17
No longer do I have my routinely standard nightmares about homeless people dressed as clowns doing dental work on me at the bottom of the ocean while being chased by radioactive super sharks. No folks, they have been replaced by nightmares of what I’m doing in Cinema 4D! Wait, maybe nightmare isn’t the right word. Maybe I mean dream, yeah, dream is the happy one, right? Sorry to potentially mislead you with the whole nightmare thing. I’m actually having decently pleasant dreams about my future in the 3rd dimension. For those of you who possibly read my first post on getting started with Cinema 4D without any previous morsels of knowledge of any 3D program, this is simply a followup of some of the progress I’ve made, and whether or not I’m on my way to be working on Pixar’s next one-word-titled movie, or if I failed horribly resulting in an enormous amount of embarrassment causing irreversible damage to my relationships of my family and friends.
So as the title obviously states, here is an update of my top 5 recaps of advancements I made in Cinema 4D during 2009. This is part 2 of 17 posts I will periodically make throughout my life time. Part 17 will come on my deathbed, and will focus on trying to do a pre-visualization of my upcoming funeral. I expect my last words before I die to be something in the area of “god damn these splines!”
From the Assistant’s Chair: Sell Your Crap!
So you’re at the local drive-in, sitting in your hot rod with a swell filly named Loralane, and you’re necking her like there’s no tomorrow. Then the roller skating waitress glides up to your car and asks if you’d like the Moon Over My Hammy special, and Loralane says she won’t go to the box social with you this Saturday night unless you get her some grub. But you reach in your pockets, pull them completely inside-out until a moth comically flies out, and it indicates to both Loralane and the roller skating waitress that you are not only broke, but you’re too poor to even afford a wallet to not hold the money you don’t have in the first place. Then she goes off with Butch from the Green Cobras on his dirt bike, and you go crying home while “Earth Angel” by Marvin Berry ominously plays from a mysterious location in the distance.
You know what your biggest problem was? That’s right, associating with those dastardly Green Cobras in the first place! Second biggest problem? You need a bunch of money! Well, if you’re in charge of your own post-production company then you are bound to have a ton of out of date equipment, because this industry is a constantly upgrading, uphill climb. And the higher you climb, the harder it will become to keep carrying all of your old stuff that you barely use anymore. So sell it!
Windows and Macs: Can’t We Just Get Along…?
My life is a lot like West Side Story. Even if you take away my constant dancing and occasional problem solving knife fights, it’s still pretty much West Side Story. Well, actually, I’ve never assaulted a police officer or had any reason to mess with the Sharks, but I did briefly date a Puerto Rican woman in college. I’m getting off topic, hold on, my original thought about West Side Story was that I use a PC at home, and Macs at work. And it tears my life apart! I’m in a constant struggle to maintain some sort of peace between the people I know, because I’m always in a state of betraying the other. My friends are all 100% Windows users, I don’t have a single Mac using friend. But at work I see the power of the Mac, something they do not see. To my friends, whenever I talk about Macs I’m pretty sure they just envision the uber-simple 1993 Macintosh computers that we used to play Oregon Trail II on in elementary school and think that Apple products are for the “slower” folks. And at work when I mention my Windows machine, I’m pretty sure everyone just imagines some horrible flurry of files scattered everywhere in all dark corners of the hard drive, a virus-ridden plague of a device that can only be turned off each night with a blue screen of death. The truth is, I use both, and when I look at them, all I see is a couple of computers…
From the Assistant’s Chair: Communication Breakdown
Here is a chronicling of my life in terms of communication skills: I was born in 1984, George Orwell was incorrect about the future, and I had little to no communication skills aside from crying a lot to get what I wanted. Elementary school in the early 1990s came next. I was good at expressing myself, perhaps too good. I would often get bored with mundane activities and verbally tell the teacher so. Let’s just say that I would often explain to my parents that my poor grades were because “my teacher hates me!” (something I still stand firm behind today). Later in summer camp, probably about 1992 at the age of 8, Ashley Vinanek would tell me she likes me, and while her friends held me down in the ball pit of a Discovery Zone, she kissed me. I very loudly yelled “GROSS!” because of some insane childhood disgust with girls (i.e. cooties), and she hated me for it and didn’t talk to me the final 2 weeks of the summer. Perhaps brutal honesty and poor communication were at play, or just a lack of knowledge that having girls hold me down and kiss me wouldn’t be common in the near future, needless to say it could have been handled better.
Cut It Out!
Ah, the words of Dave Coulier have never resonated stronger in my life than in recent days. Sure there were times on the playground in 4th grade when Full House lingo may have been more frequent, but not until I started editing did I consider Uncle Joey’s catch phrase to become a way of life. In a situation where a nice After Effects sequence or a Motion graphic project could jazz up a portion of a video that needs a little jazzing, I look to my go-to secondary editing program: Photoshop.
You could say that I’m not skilled enough in After Effects and Motion to utilize them enough so I resort to Photoshop. Well, that would be mean to say, and you know what, I think your shirt is ugly and you have poor taste in restaurants. I like to think that I use Photoshop in a good enough way that it could be the program I look to for sprucing things up, just by cutting up and rebuilding photos. So despite what my Dad insists, Photoshop can be used for more than eliminating red eye in pictures of his dog.
From the Assistant’s Chair: The Little Things
This is an ongoing study into the mind of an assistant editor, and the various small tasks he is assigned to.
An editing facility is a lot like an underground fight club. Except it’s cleaner. And more work gets done. And there aren’t any fights. It’s actually nothing like an underground fight club. But that would be awesome if it was.
Aside from misleading people with opening sentences, an assistant editor has many responsibilities that go beyond actual editing work. It’s these little things that are required of the job that not only make this place run infinitely times smoother, but they are also the reason that clients keep coming back. Having this delusion that these minor things are the most important aspect of the office is important in not only ensuring that you keep doing them, but it also boosts your ego and enables you to brag about your job to attractive women at parties.
Entering the Third Dimension!
Have you ever seen one of those movies where the kid from Montana, fresh off the farm, goes to Hollywood because he has dreams of becoming an actor, because he was the best actor in his 75 student high school’s rendition of West Side Story? Then he gets to Hollywood, with his suitcase and his cowboy hat, and he’s walking down the street wide eyed and astonished at all the bright lights and weird people that inhabit the area, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself or where to begin? Well, I feel like that farm boy, except instead of going to Hollywood I’m using Cinema 4D, and instead of seeing freaks everywhere, I’m looking at complex menu screens and lots of buttons that I have no idea what they do. I mean, look at this interface, it’s scary for someone with no background in 3D to open this program!
A decision was made by the high council of elders, at their shrine resting on the peak of the volcano, that I would be the chosen one to learn how to use a true 3D program. But I have no experience whatsoever in this area. This is my first job in this industry out of college, and to be honest, I didn’t even use something as basic as Photoshop a single time while I was in college! Let’s just say the most experience I had working on 3D was when I watched WALL-E a couple months ago. So I was nervous at the thought of learning this program, but at the same time excited at the possibility of what I could potentially do. I suppose the purpose of this post is to show you what it’s like to first delve into a 3D program if you have no idea what you’re doing, and possibly how it’s not as scary as one may think.
Multi-Language DVDs, So Easy Grandma Can Do It
Well, for this post I thought I’d show you how simple it is to create DVDs in DVD Studio Pro that utilize multiple audio tracks. We use it around here for making DVDs with multiple languages, so you could watch the same video in French, German, Portuguese, etc. This same theory can be applied to putting in director’s commentaries, or maybe you’re doing something awesome with audio tracks that I’ve never even heard of! I’m sure some of may think it’s really easy to do this, while others may have never attempted it so they don’t know where to begin, but the truth of the matter is that it is extremely easy.
There’s that saying that “it’s so easy that my grandmother can do it!”, well, I’m gonna prove that theory correct, as I have actually brought my Grandma Shirley here to the office on my lunch break to prove that even she can create multi-language DVDs!
Photoshop Tips with King Reginald of Shropshire
Oh! Hello! I was not expecting thee so soon! I assume thou art one of my many peasants, and I have a strict rule forbidding peasants to look me in the eye under penalty of death 
but I will make an exception for thee today. So thou have probably never actually met me before, I am King Reginald of Shropshire, and I am your King. Some of my hobbies include slaying dragons, drinking mead, and grilling up some hot dogs on the beach. But recently, I had the local wizard MerMac create your mighty King a device which he has called a “computer.” It has the light of a thousand candles! My favorite thing to do on this “computer” is spend all day browsing FaceParchment.com, hooking up with some old warriors from knight school that I have not talked to in like FOREVER! (btw, Sir Gallahad has gotten faaaaaaat…!) But MerMac only conjured up two programs for me, Minesweep and Ye Ole Photoshop. Having gotten instantly frustrated with Minesweep, I then focused my attention on Ye Ole Photoshop, WHICH I FELL IN LOVE WITH. Let me show thee what I’m up to today.
From the Assistant’s Chair: Dealing With Unwanted Guests
This is an ongoing study into the mind of an assistant editor, and the various small tasks he is assigned to.
Let me ask you a serious question; when you are editing a project and sitting in deep thought, contemplating what to do next, how many times do you think about purchasing a new line of make-up, and more so, how many times do you wish that someone would personally come to you while you are working to sell you that make-up? If your answer was higher than zero, then maybe this post isn’t for you.
From the Assistant’s Chair: Making DVD Labels
This is an ongoing study into the mind of an assistant editor, and the various small tasks he is assigned to.
There was this heavyset kid in my high school who constantly had stains all over his shirt. It was disgusting; it was as if he never washed his shirt. Food stains, drink stains, dirt stains, indescribable stains, whatever they were they were all horrifying. One day someone started calling him The Venus CrapTrap. Then everyone started calling him The Venus CrapTrap. Then rumors and jokes started to form around him being able to statically attract filth to himself, as if he were able to walk into a room and all of the garbage in the room would fly across the room and stick to him. I’m sure it didn’t make his life very easy, as everyone had this unfair perception of him based on his filthy shirts. I happened to eat lunch with him a few times, and he was an all right guy. He was just unimaginably lazy. But he was really smart, interesting, and an all around likeable chap. But he had the label of being a horrifying beast based on his external appearance. Now you see where I’m going with this? DVD labels are the same way, the content on the disc may be awesome, but if the label is trash, it will put people off from the whole thing.
By the way, Mike (The Venus CrapTrap) now works in a warehouse. I know you’d like me to say he’s now better than all the people who used to put him down, but he is seriously one of the laziest people I’ve ever met.
I make a lot of simple DVD labels for clients around here, in a program called Discus. There are a few do’s and don’ts, and I’d like to share a few tips to make sure no one is giving your label a bad label.
Seems like a pretty good software. Is this software free? If not, how much is it? 
That's the great article! I just pass 'n read it, two thumbs up! ;) 
Excellent! Great article, I already saved it to my favourite, 
Great Advice! This is something I'm quickly learning in my transition to freelance editing. There are so many jobs ...
Tom,I have been following your blog and I am inspired by your honesty and transparency. In this industry you ...
The Sony link seems to be down. Is there any other way to get it log and transfer plug in? 
I was SO hoping this was a real article!!!! Extremely well done. I was drooling reading it. Just last night ...
Bah. $.99 for this? It should be free! 
Dude, cracker of an Apple Fools joke. 10 out of 10. 
